...news of the sudden surge in new COVID cases in Shanghai
That 'news' will be as unbelievable as this week's and the last few years' news about how their lockdown was suppressing cases.
630 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2017
...news of the sudden surge in new COVID cases in Shanghai
That 'news' will be as unbelievable as this week's and the last few years' news about how their lockdown was suppressing cases.
Not sure if this is a real quote. but:
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Attributed to Albert Einstein https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/27/90/624908764-albert-einstein-physicist-i-know-not-with-what-weapons-world-war-iii-will-be-fought.jpg
I expect the UK (and most other countries) has some interesting boilerplate draft legislation held in standby by the civil service. The question in my mind is do the ministers get an adequate briefing on what's available in case of emergency - and the implications if they try to deploy it?
The Coronavirus Act 2020 was ready to go suspiciously quickly - I suspect there are boilerplates.
It was being implemented before reaching Royal Assent ie before it became law.
For even faster responses we don't really need any additional 'orders'. Instructing the armed forces to assist the police to 'keep the Queen's peace' has been done before in parts of the UK. Not having a pesky written constitution (sorry, Constitution) makes it easier to do.
IIRC with MS, annual support costs are typically 25-33% of the perpetual licence costs - not 2%. We then get 'support' and upgrade 'rights' when a new version comes out - though usually they'll move useful features to the next grade up so you'll have to upgrade from 'pro' to 'pro-plus' or some such bollocks.
Whatever happens they'll stick us for more money each year until we get off the damn treadmill.
Their brilliant licencing move was the 'no-downgrade' rule - so we can't buy a perpetual licence for a newer version for new staff and then run the (less capable) older version to remain compatible with colleagues.
icon: Would you like a sweetie?
"We've got some issues. We've got to solve ethics. We've got to make sure that all of the mistakes of the past don't repeat themselves. We have got to understand the life science of AI. Otherwise we are going to create a monster. I am really optimistic that if we pay attention, we can solve all of those issues," he said.
Hubris.
In Chile, a new wind farm that Google built in cooperation with power company AES Chile will take Google's first Latin American datacenter over the 80 percent carbon-free energy mark, it said. The solar portion of the project consists of 23 turbines and forms a part of a larger solar/wind portfolio that can generate up to 125 MW of energy.
I doubt the solar portion uses 23 turbines.
That sounds like an argument for the lockdown rather than against it.
Yup, that's logical.
- We found some cases, order a lockdown.
- It's not working, cases are rising. We need a tighter lockdown.
- It's still not working, cases are still rising. We need a complete curfew and to deliver rations to the people.
- Cases are still rising. Extend the lockdown.
Ummm...
Look at the 'Total Coronavirus Deaths in China' chart on the linked page:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
It's bullshit, of course.
Official statistics from China have long been unbelievable. It's obvious that they don't care if the rest of the world believes them or not.
It's significant that the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team extolled China's figures in this report published 8 June 2020.
In China, strict movement restrictions and other measures (including case isolation and quarantine) began to be introduced from 23 January 2020, which achieved a downward trend in the number of confirmed new cases during February and resulted in zero new confirmed indigenous cases in Wuhan by 19 March 2020.
So it's possible that the contact tracing app in Singapore "may have contributed to Singapore's success in squashing its early waves." but you somehow "know a similar app here in NZ helped us for over a year".
I would believe that with some good analysis to back it up.
Thank you for checking.
I've so far checked UK, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark by calculating annual age-standardised mortality rates from death and population data downloaded from HMD (using the European Standard Population 2013 age standardisation). In each case a long period (50 years or more) of declining (improving) mortality rate seems to be levelling off at around 1000 (1% of the population dying each year) with a spike in 2020 which compares with the rate 8-12 years previously. Other countries had not (last time I checked - a few months ago now) released 2020 data to HMD - or HMD had not published it for some reason. I'm looking forward to USA releasing its 2020 stats to HMD.
The remaining question is whether 2020 (and later) would have been worse without contact tracing, curfews, isolation etc - but there's almost no good empirical evidence as there's no 'control' data to compare against.
Thanks for the link - though it's not precisely the same: p-scores are a variation on standard deviations which effectively show how unusual a peak is (2020/21 was certainly unusual). I was looking at the long(er) term trends to set the expectation against which to measure the excess.
Sweden 2020: worst mortality rate for 8 years.
Please download the spreadsheet associated with this FoI response:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/adhocs/12735annualdeathsandmortalityrates1938to2020provisional
Then plot the age-standardised mortality rate from 1942-2020 (note that the data given is 'provisional')..
2020: Worst mortality rate for 12 years in England and Wales.
There may be similar data available for your country at https://www.mortality.org/ or from your country's statistics agency.
IIRC there was a specific clause in the Select and Enterprise licence agreements which prohibited using non-Windows desktops for users. I can't remember the exact wording but essentially we could use non-Windows OSes for 'line of business' applications only. In addition the 'no downgrade' clauses (If you buy an Office 2007 licence you can't run Office 2003 to remain compatible with colleagues) forced us onto the upgrade treadmill. These licence restrictions made it extremely difficult to experiment with alternatives.
I agree with your points but I'll quibble over a couple of details:
We never ask how the extortion gang can continue to afford their nice houses when their schemes get shut down, do we?
A better analogy would be drugs gangs. How can they afford to supply the drugs if their operation gets busted?
Not identifying the user to advertisers who then send ads.
I'm pretty sure they're careful not to do this. They want to sell the same information about consumers over and over again.
enforced case on the [i]username[/i] as well as on the password.
A former employer used CheckPoint's SecuRemote for remote PC to site VPN access. That used case sensitivity on the username too. We used surnames as usernames which caused endless fun where some users insisted the first few letters of their usernames should be start with 'de' or 'van der' or 'Mc' followed by an uppercase and the rest in lowercase.
Worse than that if you were typing in a password that had a substring of uppercase letters and used the capslock it would throw up a useful warning that you'd turned on capslock - but then consume the next keystroke as acknowledgement of that warning, thus making the password wrong. That one took a hell of a long time to work out.
Mobile banking apps - no thanks.
I use online banking to pay bills and sometimes to move money from one account to another - like most people, I guess. Unlike many, I use a dedicated minimal desktop VM which I maintain and start when necessary on my Linux laptop. I'm quite pleased that the banks frequently use additional verification because they don't recognise the machine (odd user agent string and no persistent cookies).
Their idea that my Android phone with their banking software loaded alongside whatever else I've decided I want to install from the Play Store is as or more secure than my VM is laughable.
How often do most people need to give new instructions to their bank(s)? Of those occasions, how many are so time critical that they must be done right now - eg while at the pub?
I wonder why they don't load games on the terminals in the few remaining bank branches? I mean, if their software is so secure that it can run alongside *anything* where's the harm?
The publisher... It claimed that the HTML used to render web pages is protected and thus cannot be altered without the approval of the copyright holder.
So they assert copyright to the HTML as delivered? That surely means they are responsible/liable for everything it does? From this we should assume that near realtime ad bidding cannot be used as they have not created/reviewed or hosted the code that they bundle into their pages.
If they successfully claim copyright then hit them for *all* undesired effects of their code on your computer.
"Y2K was caused by programmers saving space by storing years as two digits"
If year (numbers) were stored as two digits (two bytes) then we'd be OK from the year 32766 BC to the year 32767 (assuming they didn't use unsigned 'word' values). The problem is they used a two character representation which could then be fairly easily converted to a single byte number for arithmetic. Seems daft now but simply concatenating strings to represent dates seemed a great idea.
How were the pension companies (for example) dealing with their calculations for men born post 1935 who would be expected to retire in 2000 or later (age 65, in the UK)?
ONS use a 5-year average comparison for their weekly figures. For 2021 they've used an average based on 2015-2019 because 2020 was unusual.
If we try to draw a trend based on 2015-2019 we get:
Comparing with 5-year trend (2015-2019):
deaths = year x -850 + 2,247,104
Differences from 5-year trend:
2010: -45,438
2011: -53,363
2012: -40,288
2013: -32,389
2014: -37,504
2015: 4,653
2016: -9,030
2017: 471
2018: 7,536
2019: -3,630
2020: 84,010
2021: 56,645
2020+2021 total difference from 5-year trend: 140,655 deaths above trend (Diagnosed Covid deaths still seem 11% overstated).
A problem with using this trend: For 2010 to 2014 we have nearly 209,000 deaths below trend.
Pick a trend, any trend... Now justify your choice.
So far in the UK alone we have >150,000 dead.
England and Wales from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales. I consider ONS to be a more reliable source of information than the Government dashboard.
Covid deaths (Covid mentioned on death certificate):
2020: 86,240
2021: 73,315
Total: 159,555
Any cause Deaths:
2010: 493,166
2011: 484,391
2012: 496,616
2013: 503,665
2014: 497,700
2015: 539,007
2016: 524,474
2017: 533,125
2018: 539,340
2019: 527,324
2020: 614,114
2021: 585,899
Comparing with 12-year trend (2010-2021): deaths = year x 9,345 -18,306,422
Differences from 12-year trend:
2010: 16,328
2011: -1,792
2012: 1,088
2013: -1,208
2014: -16,518
2015: 15,444
2016: -8,434
2017: -9,127
2018: -12,257
2019: -33,618
2020: 43,827
2021: 6,267
2020+2021 total difference from 12-year trend: 50,094 deaths
Comparing with 10-year trend (2010-2019) - ie excluding 2020 and 2021 as 'unusual': deaths = year x 5,929 -11,430,810
Differences from 10-year trend:
2010: 5,967
2011: -8,737
2012:-2,441
2013: -1,322
2014: -13,216
2015: 22,162
2016: 1,699
2017: 4,421
2018: 4,706
2019: -13,239
2020: 67,622
2021: 33,477
2020+2021 total difference from 10-year trend: 101,099 deaths
Even assuming the most extreme trend (based on 2010-2019) diagnosed Covid deaths seem overstated by about 57%.
Accepting trend (based on 2010-2021, ie all available data) diagnosed Covid deaths seem overstated by about 200%
Note that 2015 was a bad year though obviously not as bad as 2020. There was a distinct epidemic (probably 'flu) spanning Jan-Mar 2015. 2014 was an unusually benign year.
Note that 2019 was an unusually low year too. If we define our trend line as 2010-2018 (ie exclude 2019, 2020 and 2021 as 'unusual' years) we see this:
Comparing with 9-year trend (2010-2018): deaths = year x 7,033 -13,651,269
Differences from 9-year trend:
2010: 8,909
2011: -6,898
2012: -1,706
2013: -1,690
2014: -14,687
2015: 19,587
2016: -1,978
2017: -360
2018: -1,178
2019: -20,226
2020: 59,531
2021: 24,284
2020+2021 total difference from 9-year trend: 83,815 (Diagnosed Covid deaths seem 90% overstated).
Which years do you think should be included/excluded from any trend calculations?
Note that no age-standardisation has been applied to adjust for population changes/aging.
Does this mean that only technological improvements should be considered? It sounds like introducing tech is seen as the goal, not just a tool.
The next question is: whose productivity? Helping to stop medics wasting their time and enabling them to concentrate on patients' needs would be a good start.
Of course, what we'll end up with is a new method of measuring productivity with which the management consultants will show that 'the new system' has increased performance ten-fold against metrics that have never been measured before.
Power to the medics!